BitConnect

Zazzle Shop

Friday, May 21, 2010

More than 70 years after the Hindenburg disaster ended the golden airship era, giant blimps will take to the skies again with the launch of the world's largest inflatable craft.

The pioneering Bullet 580 is a 235ftlong and 65ft in diameter ship that can lift payloads of 2,000lbs up to 20,000ft in the air.

It was inflated this week inside the Garret Coliseum in Alabama - one of the few facilities large enough to host the ship. The process took the developers at E-Green Technologies just over six hours.

The model 580 Bullet airship is 230ft in length and covered with a thin material that is 10 times stronger than steel

The £5.5million craft can be flown remotely or with a crew. The company plan to build a fleet of hire vehicles that they will rent out for between £200,000 and £550,000 a month.

Chief Executive of E-Green Technologies, Mike Lawson, said: 'It's slow enough to be used for sightseeing, large enough to carry heavy cargo and enough volume of lifting capability to be flied 20,000ft unmanned. So you have a gift of all different technologies.'

Lift is provided by a system of seven bags filled with helium, while the inner hull is full of ambient air. Hydrogen was used in the 1920s and 1930s because helium was considered too expensive at the time.

How the Bullet will look in the air. The blimp will run on algae fuel

The airship will cruise at a speed of 35MPH, which will allow plenty of time for sightseeing for any passengers

A brief history of airships...

In 1852 the French engineer Henri Giffard made the first engine-powered flight in a steam-powered airship. A year later the American DrSolomon Andrews created the first lighter than air airship. He flew one over New York city in 1865.

The first fully controllable airship flight was made in 1884. The 170ft airship La France covered 5miles in 23 minutes with an electric motor.

The first Zeppelin was launched in 1900. These had a rigid skeleton and passenger compartment.

During WWI the Germans, French and Italians operated airships but they were abandoned by 1917 due to unreliability.

Britain developed the R33 and R34 rigid airships, which flew from 1919. The R34 was the first to make an east to west Atlantic crossing.

In 1929 the LZ 127 Graf Zeppelin made the first round the world flight. British journalist Grace Marguerite, Lady Hay Drummond-Haywas on board and became the first woman to circumnavigate the world by air.

Airships were poorly equipped to deal with adverse weather and crashes and fatalities were common.

By the mid-1930s Germany was the only country pursuing airships. The Hindenburg disaster in 1937, which killed 37 people was the death knell.

The U.S used airships during WW2 for military purposes but post-war they have mainly been restricted to advertising.

The payloads are carried inside the outer envelope of the balloon, which is only one sixteenth of an inch thick yet 10 times stronger than steel. It is made from a type of Kevlar, which is the tough material used to make bulletproof vests.

Mr Lawson, said:'If you hit a hard landing, the airship is just going to kind of bounce.'

Although the airship only has a top speed of 80MPH it can take-off and land vertically. The craft is also able to hover over an area for up to a week at a time - something neither airplanes or satellites cannot manage.

The craft could therefore keep a close watch on oil spills like the one in the Gulf of Mexico or monitor pirates off the coast of Somalia.

It could also serve as a near space satellite for broadcast communications, missile defense warnings, weather monitoring and geophysical surveys.

In fact its first mission planned for later this year, will be a joint project of Nasa and Old Dominion University, which will measure moisture content in soil.

Mr Lawson said he was confident that airships had a future in the 21st century, despite their bad press in the past.

His business acquired '21st Century Airships' in November 2009, which was the world's leading airship research and development company.

The merged firm has already built and flown 14 prototypes, but the Bullet is their first commercial craft.

'Airships have undergone surprisingly little evolution throughout their more than 150-year history, and this is what makes our E-Green proprietary designs so desirable to government and commercial customers,' he said.

'Our airships are radically different designs that move beyond the performance limitations of traditional blimps or zepplins by combing advanced technology with simple construction and the ability to fuel with algae, protecting our environment.'

Algae is the latest biofuel exciting scientists. It draws carbon dioxide from the atmosphere when it grows and when the derived fuel is burned this same CO2 is released, making the fuel theoretically zero-carbon. Algae farms can also be created using brackish and waste water.

The Bullet also has a Water Condensate Recovery System, which reduces the need for helium replenishment.

The Bullet's first test flights are planned for this summer and the ship will be piloted by Captain Allan Judd who has been at the helm of smaller airships since 1986.

A BIZARRE animal corpse has washed up on a Canadian beach, reviving memories of the infamous "Montauk monster" that was discovered in 2008

Locals in a small Canadian town have been stumped by the appearance of a bizarre creature, which was dragged from a lake.

The animal, which has a long hairy body with bald skin on its head, feet and face, has prompted wild internet speculation that it is a more evolved version of the famous 'Montauk monster'. Original story

The creature was discovered by two nurses in the town of Kitchenuhmaykoosib in Ontario, Canada, while out on a walk with their dog.

When the dog began sniffing in the lake, the two women started investigating, before the dog pulled the dead animal out.

After taking some photographs of the odd animal, the nurses left it alone. When locals decided to go back and retrieve the body, it has disappeared.

The photographs have now been posted on a local website, with an explanation which reads: 'This creature was first discovered by Sam the Dog, a local dog.

'It was discovered first week of May in the creek section of town, hikers noticed Sam sniffing something in the water and they approached to see in what the Sam had detected and they noticed the creature in the water face down.

'The dog jumped in the lake and pulled the creature to the rocks and dragged it out for the hikers to see and these are the photos they took.

'The creature's tail is like a rat's tail and it is a foot long.'

There has been much speculation about what kind of species the animal is.

The body of the creature appears to look something like an otter, while its face - complete with long fang-like teeth, bears a striking resemblance to a boar-like animal.

Even the local police chief Donny Morris is baffled, saying: 'What it is, I don't know. I'm just as curious as everyone else.'

The pictures of the animal have caused mass speculation online, from bloggers who are all stumped as to what the creature could be.

One internet blogger wrote: 'That certainly is a face only a mother can love. It looks like some sort of otter, weasel-type thing.'

While another added: 'Some kind of mustelid - I thought otter first.

'Being in the water and bashed around has made the fur on the face and tail come off so clean like that.'

Many people have suggested the animal could be a new 'Montauk monster' - due to the similarities between these photographs and those of a different creature which washed up in Montauk, New York, in 2008.

The animal, which quickly earned the nickname the 'Montauk monster', thanks to the beach's location to a Long Island government animal testing facility, has never been officially identified - although the general consensus is that it was some kind of racoon.

However, other bloggers have speculated that the new creature discovered is a type of chupacabra, or 'goatsucker'.

The chupacabra is rumoured to inhabit parts of the U.S. , with many several hundred eyewitness accounts over the past few years.

But despite these sightings, the majority of biologists and wildlife experts believe the chupacabra is a contemporary legend.

Against the awesome backdrop of the sun, they are at first little more than specks.

Look a little closer, however, and you can make out the outline of solar panels, and next to it a dart-shaped silhouette.

This extraordinary image shows the Space Shuttle Atlantis docking with the International Space Station in front of the sun.

It was taken by astro-photographer Thierry Legault who, had he blinked at the crucial moment, would have missed it.

The back of the shuttle Atlantis and International Space Station can be seen passing in front of the Sun

The back of the shuttle Atlantis and International Space Station can be seen passing in front of the Sun

For despite detailed planning and even travelling from France to Spain to take the image, the actual event was visible for just 0.54 of a second because of the speed of the two spacecraft.

The 48-year-old Frenchman travelled to Madrid so he would be in the ideal location to watch the transit of the two spacecraft.

This placed him in the centre of a five-mile wide visibility band that stretched across Spain, southern France and Northern Italy.

'I came to Spain as the rest of Europe was expecting poor weather on Sunday,' he said.

'I had to be standing less than 500 metres from the centre of the visibility band and there were no second chances if I had missed.'

It is even more impressive when you consider the two spacecraft were 250 miles away and moving at 4.6 miles per second or 16,500mph.

Mr Legault caught the moment just 50 minutes before the space shuttle Atlantis docked with the International Space Station.

Mission completed: The Space Station after work was completed by Atlantis crew Ken Ham (top) and (left to right) Piers Sellers, Tracy Caldwell Dyson and Tony Antonelli

Stunning backdrop: The Space Station and Atlantis spacecraft (right) with Earth below them

The snapshot was taken in broad daylight at 1.28pm on May 16 using a specialised SBIG ST-10XE mounted camera and a 14in telescopic lens.

To ensure the quick-moving craft could be captured in direct sunlight with his camera, he combined a pin hole-sized aperture, letting in only a little light, with a extremely fast shutter speed.

Also, because he used to a prism on the lens to filter out the light, the sun appears almost ghostly and without flares.

The Shuttle was in the process of performing a back flip so that astronauts on board the orbiter could study the heat shield for any damage caused during the launch.

Expert: Photographer Thierry Legault with his giant telescopic lens and specialised equipment that took the amazing picture

The six crew on board Atlantis were delivering an antenna, Russian module and other spare parts to the orbiter.

In doing so they have doubled the number of crew at the Space Station to 12.

It is Atlantis' final journey before it is decommissioned. The Shuttle is due to return to Earth on May 26.

The space enthusiast worked out the ideal sighting of the station using the Celestial Observer website called calsky.com.

He used a Canon camera with a telescope attached and an exposure lens that allowed him to point it directly at the Sun.

This image released last year showed the Space Shuttle Atlantis and the Hubble Space Telescope in silhouette in the lower left hand corne. The sun appears ghostly because in order for the picture to be taken a prism attached to the camera filtered out most of the sunlight

Thirty years after first starring as Lando Calrissian and Han Solo in "The Empire Strikes Back," Billy Dee Williams, 73, and Harrison Ford, 67, reunited at an anniversary screening of the classic film in Hollywood last night.

If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.

So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.

Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.

We’re working together with Sony and Logitech to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.

This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.

*Nielsen, Three Screen Report, Fourth Quarter 2009

Update 2:26PM: Updated to include more information about other developers.

To celebrate the 30th anniversary of Pac-Man, Google has created the first-ever interactive and playable doodle, or custom home page logo. Seen here is a screenshot of the game, as it is being played on the Google home page.

(Credit: Google)

Saturday is the 30th anniversary of the release of Pac-Man, and to commemorate the occasion, Google is rolling out its first-ever truly interactive and playable home page logo, a fully-functional version of the iconic 1980s video game.

For years, Google has produced its so-called doodles for all kinds of holidays and special occasions, from Valentine's Day to the Fourth of July to Mother's Day and many others. In each case, the Google Doodle team works on a special logo that appears on the search engine's home page.

But a few months ago, when the team discovered that May 22 would be the 30th anniversary of the release of Pac-Man in Japan--it was actually called Puck Man, but that name was rejected in the United States because of the propensity of the "P" to chip and look like an "F"--they knew they had to do something extra special.

"When we became aware of the...anniversary," said Ryan Germick, a member of the Google Doodle team, "we thought it would be awesome to create not only something that references Pac-Man on the home page, but also something playable."

Until now, the most interactive of the logos had been one last Halloween that users could click to see more candy, and another for Isaac Newton's birthday that dropped apples. But for the Pac-Man celebration (see video below), Google has pulled out all the stops and has built, from scratch, a fully-playable version of the game, complete with 255 levels and re-created (but authentic) sounds and graphics. And unlike most of the special logos, which disappear off the home page--but are available in perpetuity in the archives--when the day is over, the Pac-Man doodle will stay up for 48 hours.

According to Germick, the company worked with Pac-Man's publisher, Namco Bandai, to make the project as realistic as possible. Yet the Google team, with the inspirational lead of Marcin Wichary, a Google senior user experience designer, built their version of the game from the ground up using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS.

"We are very excited about the Google doodle project," Namco Bandai President and CEO Kenji Hisatsune told CNET by e-mail. "With this being the first time Google has ever included sound or made a doodle playable demonstrates just how big of an impact Pac-Man has made. "

And in the end, Wichary made a "picture-perfect" version of the game, Germick said. Except for one thing, of course. Being a Google home page logo, it had to have the word "Google" in its design, so Wichary, Germick and their colleagues built their version of Pac-Man so that it had the search engine's name in the middle of the iconic board.

Growing up with gamesFor Wichary, who grew up in Poland, arcade video games were in his blood. His father was a game technician who used to take him around to arcades and let him see how the various machines worked. From those humble beginnings came a lifetime of interest in games and, now, the motivation and passion to make the Pac-Man project be as faithful as possible to the original game.

That commitment to authenticity extended, Wichary explained, to some of Pac-Man's little quirks. For example, though many people would never have experienced this, the original arcade game had a bug that resulted in anyone making it past the 255th level hitting what came to be called the "kill screen," where the machine essentially crashed. Google made sure to build that experience into their game.

Similarly, after completing some levels of Pac-Man, a player would sit through brief animations, which came to be known as "coffee breaks," since it provided enough time to stretch one's fingers and, perhaps, grab a cup of coffee. That, too, has been built into the Google version.

And the team was so focused on making their version true to the original that they even included some of the smallest touches possible, things that only the most serious Pac-Man players would know about. Wichary said those include things like the fact that in the original game, the ghosts would give the slightest hint of which direction they were going to turn by moving their eyes that way. That was included in the Google version, as was a peculiarity that allowed Pac-Man to cut corners by a couple of pixels while the ghosts had to turn them at full right angles.

In addition, Wichary pointed out that the original game was "deterministic," meaning that players could memorize and develop winning patterns. Google, too, built that into its version, meaning that those who put some serious time into the game now will be able to make a lot of headway by figuring out the patterns that work best.

Namco Bandai President and CEO Kenji Hisatsune.

"Google spent a lot of man-hours making sure the simple things that make Pac-Man were included," Hisatsune said, referencing the coffee break and 255th-level bug.

Germick explained that at Google, the Doodle team is always looking for ways to make the Google home page a "fun place to be," so once the team came up with the idea for the Pac-Man project, "it didn't take a lot of selling internally. Once people saw it, they were like, 'Awesome.'"

Putting together the Google version of Pac-Man took a couple of months, but Wichary said it would be hard to estimate how much time they actually put into the project because "I enjoyed it so much. It was a throwback to my childhood."

Indeed, Wichary said that one of his biggest reasons for getting involved in this effort was to help bring other people back to their own childhoods.

I'm feeling luckyOn a normal day, Google's home page features two simple buttons: one for a full keyword-specific search and the famous "I'm feeling lucky" choice, which picks one result based on a keyword.

For the Pac-Man project, the team has converted the "I'm feeling lucky" button into an "Insert coin" slot, reminiscent of the place where countless kids have pumped billions of quarters over the years.

Fittingly, the team decided that if they were going to make their Pac-Man game authentic, they would need to make it playable by two people at once. So where a single player will, so to speak, insert a single coin, clicking twice sets up a two-player game. In that case, one player will be Pac-Man and the other will be Ms. Pac-Man, and both will be playing on the same board at the same time, using a single keyboard.

In the end, the Google team put a lot of focus into re-building what is one of the best-known and recognized games of all time. For a game that's 30 years old, it holds up remarkably well over time, and still has a hold on popular culture.

And as something that is still a hit so many years later, it made perfect sense to the Google team to break new ground with its approach to the Pac-Man project. Yet, rather than just getting code from Namco, they decided to do things the Google way.

"I wanted to do the same thing we do with everything else at Google," Wichary said, "which is use modern Web technologies. So we built it from the ground up."

Tesla Motors, Inc and Toyota Motor Corp have officially announced a partnership in next-gen technology for electric cars that begins with a $50 million investment from Toyota. The collaboration involves not just electric cars but also parts, production and engineering support.

Governor Schwarzenegger had first leaked the news during a visit to Google's headquarters in Mountain View. It's safe to say that this was not good news for everyone. Telsa had been in talks to build their electric car plant in a former NASA manufacturing complex located in Downey City.

"We are shocked, upset and betrayed. We can see why the public is so upset with corporate America," said Downey City Councilman Mario Guerra, adding that Tesla had told the city it would sign the lease for the Downey plant on Friday.

The thousand-plus jobs the operation is expected to create will remain closer to Tesla's home-base of San Carlos, CA. The automakers are re-opening the New United Motor Manufacturing Inc., or NUMM, assembly line across the San Francisco Bay in Fremont. NUMMI--which primarily existed as a joint effort between Toyota and General Motors--had officially stopped operating in April when GM ended the 25-year partnership. A decision that cost about 4,700 workers their jobs.

The official announcement came was made at 5:00 pm today when Schwarzenegger joined President and CEO of Toyota Akio Toyoda, Co-Founder and CEO of Tesla Elon Musk to announce the historic partnership. "Toyota is a company founded on innovation, quality, and commitment to sustainable mobility. It is an honor and a powerful endorsement of our technology that Toyota would choose to invest in and partner with Tesla," said Musk.

Governor Schwarzenegger added that "We love our cars in California and California loves cars! But we also love our environment and the coastline." He went on to explain that "This all happened because we created tax incentives for this company and this partnership," Schwarzenegger said.

Maxim “magazine” (whatever that is) recently did a feature on the 30th anniversary of Empire Strikes Back for their May issue. The article included some cool pictures like this one, which shows how they created the text-crawl effect for the opening sequence.

Nowadays, anyone with a computer and an Asian friend can easily create a text-crawl, but back in the day, they had to use these things called “lens effects,” an exhausting process which involved first writing the text on papyrus (note: NOT the Avatar font) using ink made of crushed-up dung beetles, then lashing together a team of donkeys to take your scrolls (which weighed up to 400 pounds) to the village print maker, who would then lay out the text in movable type, and once it was finished, fire it in his kiln. After that, the text had to be photographed on a collodion, which required it to stand perfectly still often for days at a time to allow the daguerrotypes time to clot, which was difficult as it was the 70s, and everyone was high on cocaine back then. If you look closely, you can see that the photographer is wearing an onion around his belt, which was the style at the time.

The Marvel Studios project was originally to be shot in L.A., but an executive says it made economic sense to go to London, where the story is partly set. A tax incentive helped too.

By Richard Verrier, Los Angeles Times

Few comic book characters are as homespun as Captain America, who uses his superhuman powers to fight the Nazis during World War II while draped in the colors of Old Glory.

Yet even Captain America's overtly patriotic credentials weren't enough to keep a film about his exploits from being shot overseas.

The upcoming movie from Marvel Studios was originally to be filmed in Los Angeles. Instead, "Captain America: The First Avenger," starring Chris Evans, Samuel Jackson and Hugo Weaving, will shoot this July in London, where the story is partially set.

That decision was a blow to L.A.'s below-the-line community, which had been banking on the project to employ hundreds of crew members at a time when relatively few big-budget features are shot locally, thanks to rising competition from other states and countries.

When Marvel, which is based at Raleigh Studios in Manhattan Beach, launched its studio in 2007, executives said they planned to film their first four projects in Los Angeles. The studio has largely delivered on that pledge. The hit film "Iron Man" and its sequel "Iron Man 2," currently in theaters, were shot in state, featuring locations including the Alabama Hills in the Eastern Sierra, Edwards Air Force Base and the Sepulveda Dam.

Marvel's next release, "Thor," also was filmed mostly locally, including at the Getty Center in Brentwood, but also included scenes in New Mexico, which offers a popular film rebate.

But the studio, which was acquired by Walt Disney Co. last year, concluded that London was the best location for "Captain America," largelybecause the story is set in Europe and will feature a number of scenes in London such as Piccadilly Circus, and also because of favorable tax incentives.

Though Marvel could have done the stage work in L.A. and shot exteriors in London, it wasn't economically feasible to split the production between two locations, given the heavy filming required in Europe, said Marvel Studios co-President Louis D'Esposito, who oversees physical production.

D'Esposito, who was recently recognized by the Los Angeles City Council for his efforts to keep production in Hollywood, said he had strongly considered L.A.

"I actually had location scouts here to see what could be done,'' he said. "But it would have required so much visual-effects work and set construction, it didn't make sense."

D'Esposito acknowledged that Britain's film incentive, which offers a 20% to 25% payable tax credit on qualified expenditures, was another factor. Marvel could not apply for a tax credit from California's program because the film's budget, in the $140-million range, would make it ineligible, said D'Esposito, whopersonally lobbied California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to enact a film tax program, which took effect last year. California's program excludes films costing more than $75 million.

"This is one reason many advocate that our state's incentive program be revised," said Paul Audley, president of FilmL.A. Inc., which handles film permits for the L.A. area.

Either way, D'Esposito said, Marvel is not retreating from its long-term strategy of shooting most of its movies in state.

"These are tough financial times right now that could pressure us to look at other locations,'' he added. "But we have every intention of shooting the majority of films here."

All images by Tony Travouillon were taken at the Antarctic base of Dumont D’Urville.

Though spring is going by fast, there are certain parts of the world that are covered by snow and ice even during the summer months. In fact, it is so cold that even waves seem to freeze in midair. But can waves freeze over as word on the Intertubes would have us believe? Sorry folks, if you’ve thought yes then you’ve fallen prey to an urban myth.

Frozen waves are actually formed over time in a process called glaciation. Yup, they are nothing but beautifully shaped glaciers found all over the world - the polar regions of course but also in the mountain ranges of every continent, even in the tropics. According to Wikipedia, a glacier is a “perennial mass of ice which moves over land.” On its journey, the ice gets compacted and uplifted in the process and, as seen in the images below, often gets shaped beautifully through constant exposure to the elements.

And, quite contrary to intuition, the formations in the images shown here were formed through melting, not freezing. The downward parts on the ice that look like breaking waves are actually icicles, and the different colours are the result of how quickly the ice has frozen before melting: Rapidly frozen ice will look opaque while transparent ice is the result of ice frozen over time. Melting then produces the smooth, polished surfaces that remind us of waves.

Did you know that glaciers are the largest reservoirs of fresh water on Earth? They form the second largest reservoir of total water on Earth, second only to the oceans. Amazing, isn’t it? So what we call frozen waves or waves of ice are not only beautiful to look at but also important water resources crucial for human survival.

My Favorite Blogs

Ian M. Sherwin Giclée

.
All you art collectors out there. Here is a chance to get a Giclee copy of some of Ian M Sherwin work. Ian is planning on doing a whole series of Marblehead, Massachusetts paintings.His work is amazing.